Comment · Tue, January 10, 2023 · ND Owner
Polypodium Leucotomus seems amazing for skin
Original post in this thread
Nebulous_Inferno · 11 points
Any chance of ND making an extract of polypodium? It appears to help most skin conditions according to examine, and it does help with my dandruff more than anything else seems to.
The stuff is currently marketed as a sort of sunscreen pill, and does appear to increase the time to sunburn by three fold (insufficient to replace sunscreen, but better than nothing, approximately equivalent to spf-15 from what I read).
/u/misteryouaresodumb, any plans to add a polypodium extract?
What they were answering
fablemerchant · 2 points
What happens to the materials used in the studies? If the researchers keep the materials, could those be used as a reference?
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
Depends on the studies. Most buy from places like Sigma or USP. When those don't exist, it depends on the specific study as to how they get the materials they use, and if/how they validate them. This is my problem with a lot of studies I have been seeing lately, especially from places like Iran, Malaysia, and India. They just go out and source the plants they want to study from a local market and just assume they are correct. Sometimes they go out in nature and find the plants, then have a university botanist confirm they are correct. Very rarely do I see them to do proper testing for ID, assay, and contaminants. This is especially problematic for these half-assed toxicity studies, where we can't even be sure if the supposed toxicity was from the plant, or from a contaminant they didn't know was in their sample. Generally you will see US-based studies are better, but it depends on the specific journal they are in.
Take this study for example: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.jaad.2004.06.027
That seems to be a collaboration between Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Malaga University in Spain. They state:
The capsules containing PL (180 mg each; Fernblock, Industrial Farmaceutica Cantabria, SA, Madrid, Spain) were administered orally in a dose of 7.5 mg/kg body weight.
They say it was funded in part by Industrial Farmaceutica Cantabria, which is a manufacturer of dermatological medicines in Spain. So they got the Polypodium leucotomos from the company funding the study. I don't see anything on whether or not they verified or tested it to confirm. I think they just took the word of the people funding the study, and trusted that they were being supplied real Polypodium leucotomos. Maybe Industrial Farmaceutica Cantabria did all that testing in the background, and we just don't see it. However, we don't know for sure. We wouldn't be able to accept that as proof we had real Polypodium leucotomos.
Here is another study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4345929/
Each capsule contains 240mg of P. leucotomos extract (Heliocare® Capsules; Ferndale Healthcare®, Inc.). The placebo was an inert capsule of similar appearance.
This study was sponsored by Ferndale Healthcare®, Ferndale, Michigan. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Carl Hornfeldt during the preparation of this manuscript.
So again, this study was funded by the people trying to sell the supplement, and the supposed Polypodium leucotomos was supplied by them. Maybe they are doing the proper lab testing in the background, and it is real Polypodium leucotomos. However, we have no idea with the data we have. Also, what I know of most companies, I bet they are not doing the lab testing to the level we would require to verify it is correct.